Hasta La Gadget!

Optical engineering is something that we take for granted these days, with almost every smartphone packing its very own camera for our convenience. But if you take a look at the delicate structure inside a mobile camera module, you may appreciate the technology more every time you snap a shot. Like this cut-out diagram of the Nokia Lumia 1020’s camera, for instance: you can see how the six lens elements and other tiny parts are tightly packed together above the 41-megapixel sensor. The elements are actually a combination of five plastic lenses plus one glass lens, with the reason being a taller module would’ve been made if all the lenses were made of glass.

And to enable optical image stabilization, ball bearings are used to counteract hand movement — there’s one near the bottom right corner of the above image. Luckily, the module is also designed to withstand normal drops, so neither the bearings nor lenses would fall out of place unless you try really hard. One more shot after the break to compare sensor sizes.

Check out all the news from today’s Nokia event at our hub!

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Nokia

Comments

One of Lumia 1020’s main attractions is its Nokia Pro Camera app, which completes the phone’s 41-megapixel camera with a bunch of handy features. In our video after the break, you can see Niina (not a typo) from Nokia demonstrating the manual focusing and lossless digital zooming. The latter actually works both ways: even if you’ve zoomed in before capture (and still get native 5-megapixel resolution), you can also zoom back out while browsing these photos, as the app captures both the zoomed-in 5-megapixel image as well as the full 38-megapixel image simultaneously. This way you can reframe the image and even focus on a different subject, as CEO Stephen Elop showed us in our earlier interview. But if you don’t need this feature, you can simply set the app to capture just 5-megapixel images by default.

Check out all the news from today’s Nokia event at our hub!

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Nokia

Comments

That 41-megapixel Windows Phone you’ve been hearing all about? Well, despite the NY launch event, it will indeed launch in the UK. In fact, it’ll get here later this quarter. O2 and Three have announced that they’ll be offering the Lumia 1020 in stores and online and while both networks currently aren’t running an LTE service, Three has promised the phone it offers will be Ultrafast ready, broadly meaning it might run on 4G, but it’ll certainly offer up to DC-HSPA speeds at launch. Telefonica, the parent company of O2, has promised that an “exclusive variant of the device” will make an appearance in select European and Latin American markets. More news from the other networks when we hear it.

Check out all the news from today’s Nokia event at our hub!

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Nokia

Comments

And here she is, in all of her glory. We’ve been hearing plenty about the Lumia 1020 in the lead up to this event, and now, after a proper on-stage unveiling, we’ve finally got our hands on one. Granted, it’s not the eye-popping yellow version Elop showed off on-stage (we got to play with the white and black versions), but it’ll do nicely. As expected, the hardware’s a beauty on this thing. There’s that slick unibody design we’ve come to expect from recent Lumia devices, and in spite of amped up optics, the company hasn’t really done too much to sacrifice weight and profile. On the front is an eye-catching 4.5-inch AMOLED PureMotion HD+ display 1,280 x 768 pixel display, which nicely compliments Windows 8’s bright UI. Nokia’s also promised that the Gorilla Glass 3 display works well with gloves and is still readable in sunlight, but we’ll have to get back to you on both of those.

Remember that thing we said about the slim profile? We’ll there’s one important, but understandable caveat to that. The lens juts out a bit on the back of the thing, so if you try to lay it on that side, it won’t sit flatly — but as Elop said, the back is the new front, so maybe rest it on that shiny display, we guess… About a third of the back side is monopolized by that big lens. Along the top, you’ll see a large flash along with three buttons — one for volume (for that amped up speaker Nokia’s built in), one for power and one, naturally, for the camera. That, after all, is kind of the point here.

Check out all the news from today’s Nokia event at our hub!

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Nokia

Comments

Nokia’s Lumia 1020 has finally gone official today and, no surprise here, it’s all about imaging. To complement the handset’s 41-megapixel BSI sensor and accompanying ProCamera software, Nokia’s released an imaging SDK to devs that want to impose their own camera customizations. As of now, the Finnish company’s seeded the SDK out to the likes of CNN, Vyclone, Panagraph, Snapcam, Foursquare, Hipstamatic’s Oggl Pro, Yelp, Flipboard and Path — all of which have already been working on custom applications for the 1020. So what does that mean for the end user? Most likely, these third-party tweaks will entail high-res photo sharing and custom filters, as in the case of Path’s Lumia app. Nokia’s posted the SDK on its site for all developers today, so if you’re interested in seeing what the Lumia 1020’s beastly sensor can do for your app or what its SDK can do for WP8 apps in general, you know where to look.

Check out all the news from today’s Nokia event at our hub!

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Software, Mobile, Microsoft, Nokia

Comments

Source: Nokia Developer